Sneaky 27

Summary: The skips keep piling up and Stephanie Plum is struggling to catch them all. She comes up with a plan to capture them using Ranger's Merry Men. Is Steph willing to pay the price for Ranger's help?

Chapter 1

Vinnie had to be going insane.

I looked at my accordion file again, and tried to stuff
another case file inside. There was no
room. With three cases left over from
last week, four from yesterday and the two that I just picked up, I was going
to be busy. Nine skips were a lot to
handle.

My name is Stephanie Plum, and I am a bounty hunter. I work part-time for my cousin, Vinnie, at
the Vincent Plum Bail Bonds office.
Vinnie provides a service to the felons of Trenton. When felons are assigned a trial date, they
can either wait for their date to come up in jail, or they can pay bail and
walk free until their court date. The
bond will be returned to them when they show up for court.

Many felons do not have the money to pay this bond,
however. That is where Vinnie comes
in. For the price of fifteen percent of
the bond and the exchange of some collateral, Vinnie will loan the felon the
money to make bail. When the accused
shows up for their court date, the court returns the bail bond to Vinnie and
Vinnie returns the collateral to the felon.
He keeps the fifteen percent as his transaction fee.

I don’t have anything to do with that part of the
business. I come into play when the
felon decides not to show up for his or her court date. My job is to find them, haul them back into
the system, and return them to jail to start the whole process again. The felons would then be assigned another court
date and bail would be set for a higher amount.

When I return the felon to the system, Vinnie pays me ten
percent of the price of the bond and keeps the remaining five percent as his
transaction fee. Good deal for me, as
long as I can find them. Bad deal if I
can’t find them, or if I can’t bring them in.
And since there is no base pay, my salary is totally dependent upon my
questionable ability to bring in skips.
I’m not the best bounty hunter in the world. Or even in Trenton, if truth be told.

Recently, I started working part-time for my good friend,
Ranger. Ricardo Carlos Manoso, aka
Ranger, is the owner of the ultra-elite security company called Rangeman. With offices located in Trenton and Miami,
Rangeman offers the best of personal security services to the wealthy and
well-known. I am the company researcher
for the Trenton office. Using extremely
invasive search engines and getting information ranging from how old you were
when you were toilet trained to the last time you filled your car with gas, I
search out the background and private secrets of individuals and corporations,
summarizing the information and any concerns that I may have into a
report. This is used by staff when they
are setting up a new security system, when an existing client wants a security
check done on someone, or when Sales is trying to target a sales pitch. Spending so much time in front of the
computer is boring and puts my feet to sleep – and often the rest of me as well
– but it provides income stability, gives me benefits, and is safe. Having recently gone through some unsafe
periods in my life, there is no downplaying the importance of security.

Lula came in the office.
“It’s hot out today. It’s going
to be a real steamer.” Summer in New
Jersey is always a steamer, and this summer was proving to be no
exception. “I think today would be a
good day to go to the beach.” Lula, the
person responsible for the bail bonds filing, acted as my bounty hunter
assistant more than she did as a file clerk.
That was probably good, as she was the worst file clerk in the whole
world. Come to think of it, she wasn’t
much better as a bounty hunter. I think
she was probably much more successful in her former profession – a ‘ho – but
she gave up that lifestyle when she was brutally assaulted a few years
ago. She did not, however, give up the
wardrobe and now that it was hot, her teeny, tiny spandex tops and skirts
showed off her largeness to the extreme.
Simply put, there was too much Lula and not enough fabric to go around.

Lula had a larger than life personality with the makeup and
hair to match. A couple of inches
shorter than my 5’7” frame, several pounds heavier, many cup sizes larger,
everything about Lula screamed “look at me”.
She had brown skin, today her hair was orange to match her belly-baring
day-glo orange top, jean cut-off shorts and orange flip-flops. On most people the look would be trashy. On Lula, it somehow works.

I am downright staid in comparison. Instead of a beautiful chocolate colour, my skin
is a washed out pale white. Instead of
warm brown eyes, my eyes are a boring blue.
And instead of vibrant and ever changing hair colour, my hair is plain
brown shoulder-length curls typically pulled back in a ponytail. Add in my average body shape and conservative
clothing choices, I fade into the background when Lula is around. I don’t mind this. I am happy to let her take the limelight.

“It’s going to be a while before we go to the beach. We’ve got too much to do. When does Connie get back from her cousin’s
wedding?” I asked. The office manager,
Connie Rosolli, took the week off work to attend the wedding in Rochester. This left Lula in charge of the office, which
meant that I was flying solo in skip chasing.

“Two more days. Vinnie
will be glad to have her back. He’s been
having to do all the bonding out of felons.
He’s not too impressed with having to work.” Vinnie is the namesake of the bond
office. A slimy sexual deviant, he looks
like a weasel, acts like a weasel, and much like a weasel, has the thorough
understanding of the depraved necessary to be an excellent bondsman. He typically spends most of his time in the
office looking at porn sites and introducing Mr. Hand to Mr. Willy. He frequently deviates from regular porn to
also watch child porn and animal porn.
When his hand gets tired from jerking off, he spends his time on
gambling websites. As I said, he acts
like a weasel – no offence to weasels – and has an intimate understanding of
the unsavory and immoral.

“I have a problem”, I said, slapping my accordion file down
on the desk. “I can’t even fit all the
files in the accordion file. What is
Vinnie doing?”

“He seems to have lost his touch in deciding who he is going
to bond out, that’s for sure”, agreed Lula.

“The last few weeks have been brutal trying to keep up with
Vinnie’s skips, but this week upcoming is going to be particularly difficult.”

“Don’t complain to him.
He will bring in Joyce again.”
Joyce is my childhood nemesis, another sexual deviant who gets along
well with Vinnie. She has worked in the
past for Vinnie as a bounty hunter. She
has only caught someone once – and that was with my help – but she has
interfered several times with my own captures, resulting in the skip getting
away. “She was in here yesterday. She was wearing her schoolgirl outfit.” Vinnie hooks up with Joyce when his hand gets
tired. His wife doesn’t know or doesn’t
care. I have never been able to figure
out which.

“Trust me. I don’t
want to do anything which will cause Vinnie to bring in Joyce. I hate that woman.”

“After she shagged your ex-husband, I don’t blame you.” I was married for about ten minutes in a past
life to Dickie Orr. The marriage ended
when I walked in on the Dick with Joyce.
It was the shortest marriage in Burg history – the community in which
Joyce, Dickie and I grew up – and is still talked about to this day.

“She actually did me a favour. I wouldn’t tell her that, though. I found out later that Joyce wasn’t the only
woman he was shagging.”

“You did well to get away from him”, Lula agreed.

“I did.” I pulled out
all nine case files. “There is a wide
variety of cases here, and some for sure I would like you there to help me with
them.” I opened up the first file. “This skip, Marianne Browne, stole credit
card info by working as a cashier and taking photos of the front and backs of
credit cards. She then used the
information to do online purchasing of items.
She racked up thousands of dollars of clothing, household items and
gifts before she was caught. Her house
was crammed with stuff that she purchased on-line.”

“She sounds like she could be smart, but not particularly
violent. She could be a good one to go
after by yourself.”

“She could. This
skip”, I said, picking up the second file, “is not particularly smart. He went
into a gas station with the intent to rob it.
However, the gas station was busy and he did not want to appear suspicious. He filled his time while he waited for the
store to empty by filling out a job application. Unfortunately for him, he used his real name. The police picked him up within the hour.”

“He might have just forgot his court date. He doesn’t sound particularly smart.”

I put that file down and picked up the third. “This is another dumb crook story. I remember Morelli telling me about this when it
happened.” Morelli was my ex-boyfriend
who would like to still be my boyfriend.
He happens to be a dedicated and extremely good cop working for the
Trenton Police Department. “The felon,
Lucas Cooper, was an enterprising sort of person. He decided that he would be able to increase
his sales of various illegal narcotics by cold calling residents. Unfortunately for him, he called
Morelli. Morelli agreed to buy some
crack and arranged to meet him at a local park.
When Lucas handed over the drugs, Morelli arrested him. It was pretty funny at the time.”

“Morelli has to
like it when the drug dealers come knocking on his door.”

“Almost
literally.” I picked up the fourth
file. “Mila Madison. She showed up for her driving test
drunk. I guess she was trying to smooth
the nerves out. The assessor had her
drive into the police parking lot to show her skills at parking and, while she
was parked, the assessor walked into the police station to request a sobriety
test to be done on the student driver.
She was charged with DUI on the spot.”

“Did she get her
licence?” asked Lula.

“Nope, she did
not.”

“So she has a DUI
and no licence? That’s pretty sad.”

“Tell me about
it. The fifth here”, I said as I put
down the file and picked up another one, “is for disturbing the peace. A lady, Vivian Slater, phoned the police
department repeatedly to complain about a dog barking. She said she was trying to sleep and the dog
continued to bark. After several of the
neighbours also called to report the disturbance, police officers were dispatched
to the home. They found that it was the
woman’s own dog. She had locked it out,
had forgotten that her dog was in the backyard and was complaining about her
own dog. The police wrote her a citation
for disturbing the peace.”

“How stupid would
you feel if that was you?”

“Reporting on
yourself? Pretty stupid. This next file, for Vance Deville, is for
someone who was transporting dynamite.
That in itself is not a crime unless it goes off and what did it
do? It went ka-boom.”

“Was Deville all
right?”

“I don’t
know. The file doesn’t say, but he has
to be still alive if he is wanted for skipping bail. The seventh case is for Jonathan Jones. He lied in court, giving false evidence in a
rape case, giving a false alibi for the rapist.
He was caught in the lie, and was arrested as a result.”

“Perjury is a
terrible thing. I guess he don’t believe
in no Bible.”

“I guess
not. The next case is for Isaac
Wang. We brought him in a few weeks ago
and a few weeks before that, and he has failed to show again at court. I don’t know if you remember him. He was caught selling black market copies of
movies. He had a vast number of boxes of
movies at his house, and even more on his computer. When the police came to his house to talk to
him, he was in the process of making disks to sell.”

“I remember
him. Nice guy. He offered us whatever movie we wanted for
free if we just let him go.”

“And I remember
that you were going to take him up on it.”

“Hey! He had some
really good movies there! Some of them
were still in the theatres”, she said defensively.

“The last file is
for Nolan Nyetta. This is a high
bond. This guy is sick. Nolan has raped three little girls, giving
them AIDS in the process.”

“Ah, the virgin
cure.”

“What’s that?”

“The virgin cure
is the myth that having sex with a virgin will ‘cure’ a man by cleansing him
from any kind of sexually transmitted infection.”

“And there are
men who actually believe this to be true?”
I was horrified.

“Yes. Sick, isn’t it? There are some little girls getting up in the
morning, their biggest consideration being who they are going to play Barbies
with, not knowing that by the end of the day they will be infected with a
terrible disease, solely because they are virgins. As a ‘ho, you always had to be careful about
STIs. I never had one, but that was
because I insisted on condom use and I got tested regularly. Part of the virgin cure myth says that the
man can’t use a condom. He has to dip
his wick without covering up. Those
little girls don’t stand a chance. The
fact that Nyetta has not shown up in court makes me wonder if he is still out
there raping little girls. You might
want to take Ranger on that one. We want
that guy caught right away. I wouldn’t
want to take the chance that it gets messed up.”

“You think I
would mess it up?”

“Not
purposely. Sometimes you have bad luck.”

“Hunh.” But really,
what could I say to that? She was
right. Sometimes I did have bad luck.

“Besides, if you take me I might purposely – by accident, of
course – shoot him.”

SandraHan1:
This story is very descriptive, with vivid scenes from the very beginning, which made for a good scene setting. I love the symbolism in names, such as “Naysayers”, “Hadd”, etc . The story itself is revolutionary, intriguing, emotional and exciting. I was very pleased to see that there is a happy ...

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snowview03:
This is the first book I have read on this app and I loved it! When I read the title I thought about the hunger games, but this novel is so much more. Some book have a comparison between other books that fallow like premises so i will do my own: Arena has the compellingly emotional stresses and t...

Marijana1:
The melancholy present throughout this story has the power to influence and etch into the minds of the readers, to stay there and refuse to leave even after they have finished reading the story. This is a deep, powerful story, making the readers wonder about everything – about love, about their e...

Sonali Srivastava:
It is very Fancinating to read a story full of Fantasy and specially when love is not complete as story , I really like the Imagination of Author and his writing skill, u dictated everything so beautifuly that when I read it I lost in the story and I hope I will read soon the second year of Zakir...

William Elliott Kern:
Long story, the plot uncovered midway through the story. From beginning, the story was fast moving. Then dragged on for quite some time. The Author was good in describing her characters, their clothing, etc. but a lot of that disclosure distracted from the story moving fast.Not withstanding, the...

Mary Abigail:
I have always been a serious reader but reading romance has always been an outlet for me to be happy and this, makes me happy. It's entertaining with just enough drama and maybe a bit more - I do need more.

Wendi Getz:
Very powerful and moving story! A great read, especially for young women. I loved how it pulled the reader down the slippery slope that is domestic abuse and gave us an inside view of how easy it is to end up in that situation.

Ashley Kimler:
I love the drama and the darkness of this story. Sadly, I was distracted my editorial errors and couldn't delve into it. The grammar mistakes kept me from being able to forget where I was and immerse in the story. If not for that, I think I would have given this chapter 5 stars. My advice to the ...

_Dusks_kiss:
I never knew that one of my favourite childhood cartoons could turn into such a beautiful story. Tho there are many grammatical errors and writing errors, this story warmed my heart to 100%. I would definitely want this book to get published and I would also buy it. It’s amazing character develop...

Alkira Joan:
Great story, I found it hard to read especially the dialogue. You just need to fix up some spelling errors and the gramma .I enjoyed this book. was a little hard to get though.,.,..,.,.,,..,.,.,, , , , ,.,, , , , , , , ,., ,,.,,,,,

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